Fiction in a Southern Context

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a plot for pridemore, camp redemption, fiction, georgia, mercer university press, missouri, raymond atkins, south, southern fiction, Stephen Roth

If you enjoy reading Southern fiction, check out Camp Redemption by Raymond L. Atkins. It’s about a brother and sister who own a cash-strapped children’s church camp in north Georgia, and one day receive an unexpected visitor. Like a lot of fine Southern writing, this novel has charmingly eccentric characters, a strong appreciation of history, and asks some rather pointed questions about God’s involvement in everyday life. It’s also beautifully written and funny as heck.

Camp Redemption was published by Mercer University Press after the book won the 2011 Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction. My first novel, titled A Plot for Pridemore, won the 2012 Ferrol Sams Award, and will be published by Mercer in Spring 2014. According to the press, the award is given to the “best book that speaks to the human condition in a Southern context.” Even though my book takes place in Missouri (which may or may not be part of the South, depending on whom you talk to), it has a distinctly Southern point of view, and draws heavily from my time growing up in Georgia.

Upon receiving Atkins’ novel in the mail, examining the beautiful cover art, and reading the author’s wonderful, flowing prose about the hills and valleys of lower Appalachia, I am even more excited and humbled (and perhaps a little intimidated) to be joining Mercer’s roster of fiction writers. At this point, I am still in the early stages of editing my manuscript with the press, but I’ll have updates in the approaching months about how the book is coming along. Becoming a published author has long been a dream of mine, and I hope to share parts of my adventure with all of you.

Image pulled from http://www.mupress.org.

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The NFL: Bloated, Sanctified, Self-Important

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ben fountain, billy lynn's long halftime walk, culture, espn, football, iraq war, kansas city chiefs, NFL, nfl draft, television

As most of you know, today is hugely important for America because it is the first day of the NFL Draft. Intense coverage of the draft began roughly two minutes after the Super Bowl ended and has continued nonstop on ESPN’s fleet of cable channels since that time. There have been camps, combines, workouts and any number of nattering nabobs speculating on how the draft will transpire. In a way, the NFL Draft has become a season unto itself, only slightly less important than the NFL regular season, and more important than just about everything else in sports.

In Kansas City, where I live, the draft is of particular interest because the hometown Chiefs have the first pick. Locally, there’s been endless guessing about what the Chiefs will do with their coveted selection. The consensus is they will pick a left tackle because there are no elite quarterbacks in the draft and because, well, they’re the Chiefs. There’s a reason why this boring, humdrum team hasn’t visited the Super Bowl since 1970.

“With the first pick of the 2013 NFL Draft, the Kansas City Chiefs select… a left tackle?”

All the hype about the draft, and the fact that the NFL is now a year-round story, mystifys me. Like a lot of people, I watch my share of pro football games, and I track the standings during the season. But there’s an arrogance and hyper sense of self-importance around the NFL that turns me off. Each season, I find myself watching less and less pro football, and the fact that we have a toddler running around the house is only part of the reason for that. The other part is that the games, more often than not, are boring, plodding affairs that steal too much of a Sunday afternoon. The army of television personalities charged with selling the NFL brand also leaves me cold: while the hosts play grab-ass in the studio like a bunch of aging frat boys, the announcers call and analyze the action with the breathless intensity of reporters covering a hostage crisis. Either way you slice it, it’s overdone and over-the-top.

Ben Fountain’s best-seller, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, describes in a single paragraph what the NFL has become better than anything else I have read. His book, which is about how Americans view our soldiers and the Iraq War, takes place over the course of a Dallas Cowboys football game (if that makes no sense whatsoever, click here for this fine review of the novel).

Anyway, here’s how Fountain describes the action on the field at venerable Texas Stadium:

And if it was just this, Billy thinks, just the rude mindless headbanging game of it, then football would be an excellent sport and not the bloated, sanctified, self-important beast it became once the culture got its clammy hands on it. Rules. There are hundreds, and every year they make more, an insidious and particularly gross distortion of the concept of “play,” and then there are the meat-brain coaches with their sadistic drills and team prayers and dyslexia-inducing diagrams, the control-freak refs running around like little Hitlers, the time-outs, the deadening pauses for incompletes, the pontifical ceremony of instant-replay reviews, plus huddles, playbooks, pads, audibles, and all other manner of stupefactive device when the truth of the matter is that boys just want to run around and knock the shit out of each other.

That about covers it. There is no “play” in today’s NFL. And football is far too lucrative now to be considered a mere game. Somewhere along the line, the league engulfed autumn Sundays so completely that many churches have adjusted their service times to accommodate kick-off. It’s official: pro football is bigger than God to a lot of people in this country.

The Episode in Which “Madmen” Jumps the Shark

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1960s, advertising, amc, don draper, madmen, new york, peace corps, television

SCENE: It is a Sunday morning at the Drapers’ spacious Manhattan apartment. MEGAN DRAPER lounges on the couch in a silk nightie, flipping through the pages of Look Magazine and smoking a Virginia Slim. DON DRAPER enters the apartment and drops his keys on a nearby table. He wears a ruffled charcoal grey suit and a loosened burgundy tie.

DON: Good morning.

MEGAN: Where were you all night? You look like hell.

DON: (Staring into the hallway mirror and smiling slightly.) I do, don’t I?

MEGAN: Are you drunk?

DON: As a matter of fact, I’ve never been more sober.

(DON drags a trash bin from the kitchen and places it next to the living room liquor cabinet. He stoically pulls one bottle after another from the cabinet and tosses each one into the trash. MEGAN rushes to him and grabs him by the arm.)

MEGAN: Don! What are you doing?

DON: (Not looking at her) Something I should have done a long time ago.

MEGAN: This is crazy. What’s gotten into you?

(DON ignores her, continuing to pile bottle after bottle into the bin. There are a lot of bottles, so it takes a while. When he finishes, DON turns to his wife and puts his hands on her shoulders. He looks at her dreamily, as if he is seeing her for the first time. He takes the skinny cigarette from her mouth and tosses into the trash with all the bottles.)

DON: Honey, this guy walked into my office yesterday. We spent the whole night talking.

MEGAN: What kind of guy?

DON: I’ve never met him before. He said he was with the Gideons and he gave me this (He pulls out a pocket-sized New Testament and places it on top of the liquor cabinet). Megan, have you ever heard of being born again?

MEGAN: What are you talking about?

DON: (Getting down on one knee and looking up at his wife with a pleading expression. There are tears in his eyes.) Look, I’ve done a lot of bad things in my life. Drinking, carousing, deceiving. There’ve been women. A lot more than you know about it. So many, even I’ve lost count. In a way, you could say my whole life has been a lie. When I came back from the war in Korea… Well, maybe that’s a story for another time.

MEGAN: Don, I–

DON: –But I think I’ve got a chance to set things straight. Tomorrow morning, I’m walking into Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce and I’m handing them my resignation. I’m giving up my partnership. The agency’s no good for me. Not for what I’ve got planned. Besides, advertising has bored me for years. I think it’s the Heinz account that finally put me over the edge.

MEGAN: But you’ve spent your whole career building up that company. What on earth are you going to do?

DON: (Smiling slyly.) Well, there’s this little thing call the Peace Corps.

MEGAN: Oh, Don, no!

DON: Listen. All my life, I’ve taken from people. I’ve been a crappy husband, a crappy father. I’ve made up ads that testify that true happiness can only be found through the purchase of the right brand of deodorant. I’ve worshiped false idols, and I’ve created false idols. But now I think I can give something back. I think I can get my hands dirty in a different way. Megan, do you know where Sierra Leone is?

(MEGAN says nothing, but starts tearing up).

DON: Hey. Hey! I know it sounds crazy. But listen to me! Listen to me! Listen to me! (He is shaking her by the shoulders.) Everything we know, everything in this apartment… It’s all phony. It’s nothing. Out there is the real world. The Third World. Look, it’s only for a couple of years. After that, you can go back to your acting. You hate working on that soap opera, anyway.

(He kisses her tenderly on the forehead, puts a hand under her chin and nudges it up so that MEGAN is eye-to-eye with him.)

DON: What do you say? Just you and me? We can start over.

MEGAN: (Looking at him hopefully). Yes. YES!

DON: You’ll never regret this. I swear. We go in for our immunization shots tomorrow.

MEGAN: Uhm, okay.

(The two hold hands and look out the massive window as the sun peaks above the New York City skyline. It is a new day for DON and MEGAN DRAPER).

Boston and London

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1993, bishopsgate, bombings, bombs, boston, boston marathon, IRA, london, violence

The April 1993 bombing at London’s Bishopsgate

 

Not to belittle what has happened in Boston, but the past week’s tragedy reminds me of the five months I spent as a student in London in 1993, when bombs went off on a regular basis and terrorist cells were embedded throughout the city. There was a bombing at Harrods department store and this horrific attack at Bishopsgate that, amazingly, killed only one person. Britain’s long war of attrition against the Irish Republican Army was in full swing, and it was not unusual to be evacuated from a public area or to make an unplanned Tube stop because someone reported a suspicious-looking package or backpack that might be a bomb.

For Londoners, it was a point of pride to continue their regular routines despite the bombings and the occasional loss of life. Even though attacks occurred every few weeks, deaths were unusual because the IRA had a policy of warning the authorities shortly before most explosions. The goal of the bombings was to instill fear and create disruption. Londoners refused to play along. During my short stay, I never sensed fear or panic among the city’s leaders, media or the population. The idea of locking down most of London for a full day because one bomber was on the loose would have been unthinkable. London endured more than four years of The Blitz, after all. It certainly wouldn’t come to a standstill because of a few well-planted homemade explosives.

My point is not to criticize the people of Boston or their city’s handling of the Marathon bombings. Today’s shutdown of the city was a success because it helped bring the two bombing suspects to justice. But I do think the hysteria of the last few days illustrates how fortunate we are to live in a country where these kinds of attacks are extremely rare. What happened Monday in Copley Square would represent a typical afternoon in many other parts of the world, and not just in the trouble spots we know about from the evening news.

I hope and pray that attacks like the one at the Boston Marathon continue to be so uncommon that they warrant the kind of around-the-clock news coverage we have seen all this week. I also hope that we as a country can someday do more to combat the gun violence that claims and destroys far more lives. But that’s a topic for a different post.

Image pulled from http://www.BBC.Co.Uk

The Story Behind the Photo (Maybe)

Tags

beer, dick cheney, fiction, humor, iraq, politics, raccoon, vice president, war, washington, wyoming

“You’re going to love this one, Roscoe,” Dick said as he popped open another longneck. “It’s from a microbrew called Freedom Rings in Jasper. They have a really good pale ale.”

He brought the bottle to Roscoe’s lips, then tipped it back slowly. Raccoons can do a lot of things, Dick thought, but their paws weren’t very adept at handling a cool beverage.

Dick smiled as he watched the sun dip over the trees that lined his Wilson, Wyoming, home. There was a time when he was the most powerful, influential man in the world, when he might stroll into the Situation Room after breakfast to watch the shock and awe rain down on Baghdad and think to himself, “This is my war.” Those were heady days, and it was hard to remember everything about them. Did he abuse his authority? Maybe. Did he overreach himself? Sure. The great ones often do.

That was a few years ago. Now it was just Roscoe and him, sitting on the back porch, sharing a few brews and watching the summer light fade. Lynne was out of town, so it was just the boys. In a little while, he and Roscoe might pile into the F-250, drive into town and stir up some trouble. For now, Dick wanted to relax and enjoy the stillness.

“You know, I didn’t really give a damn whether we found weapons of mass destruction or not,” he said. “We had to go in there. Some people will never understand that.”

“Shut up, Dick,” Roscoe growled, “and hand me another beer.”

Image pulled from DudeLOL.com.

Coaches Can be Bullies? You Don’t Say!

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basketball, bullies, bullying, coaches, coaching, mike rice, mr. woodcock, opinion, rutgers, sports

Mike Rice, captured mid-scream.

In the last few days, there has been much hand-wringing and posturing in the media about a newly released video of Rutgers University basketball coach Mike Rice screaming, shoving and hurling basketballs at his players during practice. The footage, we are told, is “shocking.” Several celebrity sports figures, including NBA star LeBron James, have called for Rice to be fired. Rutgers administrators did just that on Wednesday and are now answering questions about why they didn’t fire the coach months ago when they first learned of his abuses.

To me, what’s most shocking is how a big-time coach like Rice can behave like this on camera and not expect it to eventually wind up on YouTube or ESPN. What is less surprising to me is the coach’s disgusting behavior and demeaning treatment of his players. Coaches have acted like this for a long time, even on the lower, more hidden levels of the sports world. Surely jock-worshipers like the talking heads on ESPN are aware of this.

When I was in fourth grade at a small private school, we had a surly P.E. instructor named Coach Whitney. He was also the school’s varsity basketball coach and it was pretty clear to everyone that teaching 10-year-olds was not a favorite part of his job. One day, my classmates and I were lined up for some sort of exercise and I was giggling with one of my friends. The coach grabbed a dodge ball, hurled it as hard as he could from about 20 feet away and hit me square in the face. My classmates laughed nervously. We were all afraid of Coach Whitney, who stared me down for a few seconds before turning his wrath to someone else. I was embarrassed and, obviously, red-faced, and I never spoke to anyone about the incident.

My subsequent coaches were a little better, but not much. In seventh grade, one of them strongly suggested to my class that I was a sissy because I took piano lessons and was good friends with one of the more sensitive boys in our grade. In 8th grade, another coach basically ignored me until it was time for me to received a paddling for misbehavior. In 10th grade, I had a female coach glare at me and tell me I was worthless.

Was Bear Bryant a great coach? Absolutely. Was he an abusive megalomaniac? Perhaps.

I don’t bring this personal history up to inspire pity. I had a good childhood and was not scarred in any way by my bad teachers or coaches. My intent is to point out that coaches, in many cases, are jerks. There were a lot of them who behaved aggressively and churlishly when I was in school in the 1980s. I’m sure there  also were coaches who were caring, inspiring molders of young men and woman. I don’t remember knowing any, though.

I know things have changed a lot in the 30 years since I was a kid. Our camera-filled, media-saturated society is less tolerant of bullying behavior, which is a good thing. But I sense that there are probably still a few jerks out there in the coaching ranks, as Mike Rice’s now-famous tantrums suggest. For anyone to pretend otherwise is to be totally ignorant of sports on even an elementary school level.

There’s a reason why Billy Bob Thornton’s Mr. Woodcock strikes a chord with many adult men my age. It’s not because we have incredibly bad taste in movies. It’s because we all knew a Mr. Woodcock at some time during our formative years. Many of us would probably like nothing more than to bean him with a rubbery dodge ball today.

So how about you? Any “shocking” gym class stories you’d care to tell? Or maybe you can recall a coach who encouraged and inspired his or her pupils? Do you believe Rutgers’ treatment of Mike Rice was fair and just? I’d love your perspective.

Images pulled from of http://www.redelephants.com and http://www.chicagonow.com.